Dragon Ball FighterZ Is the Stress Relief I Need in My Life

You've seen Stand and Deliver, right? Remember that part where Edward James Olmos is talking to those keeds about how they need to have the ganas? The dees-eye-errr? You know, to get off the streets and learn calculas? That's kind of how I feel about video games all the time. I love 'em a lot, but a lot of times playing them isn't just about having the time to play them, it's also about the ganas. The sheer willpower to not just choose a video game, but choose what to do in that video game, and sometimes, whom to do it with. To do the math and determine whether or not the amount of time you have available will add up to a worthwhile level of progress that leaves you feeling satisfied with your entertainment choice. All sorts of things you don't have to think about when you boot up Netflix, you know? This is why, for this last month has been a wonderful time to discover just how damn good fighting games have become.

A lot of it just comes down to a certain sense of purity when it comes to the design philosophy of fighting games. Like sports games, fighting games know that you got them primarily for one thing: To go a few rounds, as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Of course, they make efforts to flesh out their offerings, with an array of modes and features that encourage you to play for a very long time with as many variations on the central theme of beating the tar out of another character as possible, but they are under no illusions that you're buying these games for their story. You're getting them to fight.

But, as I mentioned earlier, it also helps that fighting games are in an extremely good place right now. Few games signal that as strongly as Dragon Ball FighterZ. (Which the developers insist is pronounced "dragon ball fighterz," not "dragon ball fighter zee," but it's cute that they think that's gonna stop me.) It's easily the most exciting game to hit the fighting game scene in a long time. It's the most feverishly covered fighting game in some time (maybe a little too much so), and for pretty good reason: It's fun as hell, well-tuned, and perhaps the best fighting game to take on Dragon Ball yet. Which is no small feat: There are about as many Dragon Ball fighting games as there are Quavo features, and they've never really found success outside of diehard Dragon Ball Z fans. But FighterZ is being embraced by people who love fighting games and people who love Dragon Ball—two groups that, when you put them together, pretty much shakes out to Most Men You Know.

I love FighterZ. It's extremely easy to learn, with combos that you pull off by hitting one button and the same exact button inputs to pull off special moves, regardless of what characters you play as. This means that the gap between "Infant" and "Fighting God" is extremely narrow compared to most fighting games, and it only takes a little bit of familiarity to learn and appreciate what it takes to be a player of impressive skill.

FighterZ also has all that fun extraneous stuff that encourages you to play more, like an in-depth story mode that is one of the goofiest things I've ever seen: the game's characters actually acknowledge you, the person on the couch playing the game, as some kind of disembodied spirit that straight-up possesses characters in order to help them save the world. It's some serious Monty Python-ass anime shit, and I love it.

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It's also the game I needed at this point in my life, and I imagine it's one that would suit anyone in extremely stressful circumstances. February was among the most demanding months I've had in recent memory, and I just couldn't stomach the idea of delving into most games in my library, even ones I was really excited about. I had maybe fifteen minutes at a time to play a game, and even the games that sell themselves as pick-up-and-play—be it Star Wars Battlefront II or a racing game like Forza Motorsport are actually far less about being pick-up-and-play experiences and more about momentum—giving you a steady stream of rewards and reasons to stay on for another five, ten, or twenty-minute chunk. In a quick race or deathmatch, there are a variety of things you could be doing: running, cruising, white knuckling your way through bottlenecks, what have you. Play a fighting game for five seconds, and that's the whole experience: Throwing everything you can at your opponent, while trying to counter everything being thrown at you. It's wonderfully pure, and great for blowing off steam.

There are also loads of options to choose from—FighterZ isn't the only game I've been playing. Street Fighter V has spent the last three years getting constantly updated with new stuff, and what started as a thin excuse for a Street Fighter game is now a full-fledged experience worth getting into in a big way, with a ridiculous number of modes to fight through and a huge roster of characters. (It's also been rebranded as Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition.) Injustice 2 remains as great as it was when I first played it, and has kept things wonderfully weird in the year after its release by adding unexpected characters like Hellboy and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Hell, even Killer Instinct isn't all that bad, if you've got an Xbox and don't mind playing a free-to-play fighting game that works overtime to get you to drop some money on it.

And yes, I really have been bouncing back and forth between these four games all month long like a coked-up arcade fiend who is suddenly extremely invested in the fictional history of the Shadaloo organization and Ryu's struggle against the Satsui no Hado within him, and hey, did you want to find out if Trunks could beat Piccolo in a fight because man have I got a game for you...

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